Subscribe to the Intimate Philosopher on:

The Eighty Percent You Didn’t Come Here to Change

Dr. Emma Smith and Dr. Alivia Stehlik on the 80/20 rule in relationships, why the competence that built your life is the same competence holding your erotic life exactly where it is, and what a Chemex has to do with any of it.

Summary

Couples arrive with a percentage already calculated. They’ve run the numbers in the car on the way over, and they present the finding with some confidence: ninety percent of this is good. We like each other. We’re solvent, we’re functional, we’re raising decent humans. It’s the sex. Fix the sex.

Then I ask how much of an ordinary day sex actually occupies, and the arithmetic collapses. The honest answer for most people, most weeks, is a rounding error — the average encounter, as best I understand the figure, runs somewhere in the ten-to-fifteen-minute range, which is not the number anyone wants to hear and is nowhere near the marathon the culture keeps advertising. So the thing they came to fix is not twenty percent of the relationship. It is a great deal less. And the change I am going to ask them to make is a great deal more.

Focus of the Episode

This is the conversation Dr. Alivia Stehlik and I got into this week, and it started somewhere unlikely: a business book I refused to read for the better part of a year. 10x Is Easier Than 2x, by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. I assumed I knew the genre — stacks of cash on a table, a man in a rented Lamborghini explaining leverage. I was going to borrow it from the library, dip a toe in, and be done. Five minutes into the audiobook I ordered the hardcover because I could tell I was going to want to write in it. One of the first thinkers quoted is Viktor Frankl, who is the reason I became a therapist at all, and an existential one at that. Frankl, load-bearing, in a book about scaling a company. The absurdity of everyday life, arriving right on schedule.

The premise is not what the title suggests. 10x is not a quantity in this book; it’s a category change. You learn to read. You learn to drive. You learn to ride a motorcycle. As Alivia put it, using the math brain she brings to everything: it is a decimal point shift, not an accumulation. You are not doing more of what you were doing. You are no longer the same person who was doing it.

And the mechanism underneath it is where this stopped being a business conversation. Roughly twenty percent of what you do is generating the value. The other eighty percent is fine. It’s safe, it pays the bills, it is not hurting anyone. It is also the reason nothing is changing. To go anywhere qualitatively different, you don’t optimize the eighty. You let it go.

Alivia was the one who ran that math relationally, and it landed the way an uncomfortable true thing lands. They come in believing the problem is narrow and contained. Then it turns out they have to reinvent eighty percent of themselves.

Auto-Drip is Not the Sex

Here is the part of the episode where I have to admit I lost an argument that ran for years.

Alivia has said for as long as I’ve known her that everything is sex, which put her in company with Abby Wambach and, for a long time, put her nowhere near me. Making coffee, she claimed, could be the sex. I used to set the pot the night before and wake up to a machine that had already done the work. She uses a Chemex, and sometimes a hand grinder, and the whole thing is a process. Her position is that even if you could replicate it perfectly by automation, it still wouldn’t be as good — that something gets imbued in the making. She’ll tell you herself she can’t prove it, that we’d need a blind taste test, that this is her woo-woo showing.

She has finally convinced me, and not for the reason she thinks. When the Chemex broke and she offered to replace it with something else, I said no. By then the object had stopped being equipment. It had become the shape of a person’s attention, made every morning, on purpose, for me.

That is the whole argument about desire in a long partnership, sitting in a glass cone on a counter. The conditions that make arousal possible are not located in the fifteen minutes. They are located in the quality of attention that precedes them by about eleven hours. Presence is a quality problem before it is a scheduling problem. Which is why the couples who tell me this is my best friend and then speak to each other like two people splitting a utility bill are giving me more information than they mean to.

The Inventory

So here is what to do with this, because an idea you can’t put your hands on isn’t worth much.

Write down everything you currently do in service of your relationship. Then narrow it: everything you do in service of your sex life specifically. Every text, every ritual, every workaround, every accommodation. Then go down the list and cross out the ones that do not make you feel the way you said you wanted to feel about yourself, your partner, and this particular type of connection. Inefficiency is not the criterion here. Inertness is.

Then look at what survived, and consider that the answer may not be adding more. It may be concentrating what’s left until it takes up more room.

Alivia’s move here was to widen what I had narrowed, and she was right to. Go granular, yes — and then pull the aperture all the way open and ask what your entire life is doing to the relationship you say you want. Because even the neutral parts aren’t free. Neutral still costs time, energy, attention, money. Neutral is eighty-percent behavior wearing a very good disguise.

This is where the Type A++ pattern shows itself most clearly. I work with people who have built extraordinary things, who can run a company and a household and a calendar with surgical precision, and who somehow believe the relationship is sealed off from all of it — a separate ledger, unrelated to the business. It isn’t. I’d argue the causation runs both directions, and I’ll make that case more fully on the fourteenth.

There’s a line Alivia handed me from the book, a revision of the one everybody knows. The old version: what got you here won’t get you there. The book’s version: what got you here will keep you here.

I sat with that for a week. What got you here was remarkable. It built the life. It is also, right now, the thing holding the erotic life exactly where it is — and it is very hard to ask someone standing on a mountain of their own success to come down from it.

This one is for you if…

This one is for you if everything you’re doing isn’t working. If everything you’ve tried hasn’t made lasting change. It’s not about working harder, pushing more. It’s a qualitative shift.

A question worth considering

If you wrote out everything you currently do in service of this relationship and crossed out everything that isn’t making you feel the way you said you wanted to feel, how much of the list survives? And who would you have to be willing to stop being, to replace it?

Moments Worth Noting

They think they’re there for some narrow specific problem — everything’s great except for our sex life. And then it turns out they have to reinvent 80% of themselves.

It is more than just the sex, especially when we’re reducing sex down to a physical act. Instead of thinking about what are all of the conditions and contexts that create the space for desire to emerge, for bodies to become aroused.

Auto-drip is not the sex.

You constantly tweak your process because things aren’t working, or because it’s not as good as it could be. That’s how you get to a life that you want. That’s how you get to a cup of coffee that you want too.

Chapters

• 00:00 — Opening, and an unexpected search result
• 03:14 — The book I refused to read: 10x Is Easier Than 2x
• 06:10 — Viktor Frankl, load-bearing, in a business book
• 08:42 — The twenty percent that works and the eighty percent that doesn’t
• 11:28 — Ten-x as a category change, not a quantity
• 12:20 — What an eighty percent change looks like inside a relationship
• 14:14 — More than the sex: conditions, contexts, and “everything is sex”
• 15:36 — The Chemex argument, and what intention does to a cup of coffee
• 20:42 — Future self: why the present answers to who you’re becoming
• 24:17 — The inventory exercise
• 26:05 — Widening the aperture
• 27:52 — Why the relationship is not a separate ledger from the business
• 30:10 — From eleven dollars an hour to here
• 31:26 — “What got you here will keep you here”
• 33:10 — Inside the August 14 masterclass
• 36:57 — Closing

---

The Receipts

If you love when things get EXTRA nerdy, this section of the show notes is for you!

• 10x Is Easier Than 2x — Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. The book at the center of this episode.
• Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl. Quoted early in Sullivan and Hardy, and the reason Dr. Emma became an existential therapist.
• Be Your Future Self Now — Benjamin Hardy. The companion volume behind the future-self discussion, offered here as general background for anyone who wants to follow that thread.
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow — general background for the flow-state reference, and a through-line from Episodes 29 and 30.
• Abby Wambach — named in passing, in the good company of “everything is sex.”
• Alex West — former Navy SEAL, SEAL Team Six operator; joining the August 14 masterclass on capacity, presence, and knowing when to switch modes.
• Nattie Frasca — pleasure coach and host of the Feminine Rebellion podcast; joining the August 14 masterclass on the myths women are taught about their bodies and pleasure.

Dr. Emma is hosting a free virtual masterclass this August on investing in your relationship before crisis makes the decision for you. Join her!

Nashville friends: Dr. Emma will be speaking at Stimulate, a sexual wellness symposium downtown on August 3rd on the philosophy of pleasure in the 21st century.

Keywords: relationships, curiosity, intimacy, dating, connection, late-in-life virginity, vulnerability, desire, communication